President Barack Obama has tapped former deputy attorney general James Comey to head the FBI, according to Administration officials. A Republican, his selection is likely to be met with broad bipartisan support. That has much to do with his sterling résumé, which includes his time at the Department of Justice and his record as the top prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

But it has even more to do with Comey’s leadership during the most important confrontation between U.S. law enforcement and the White House since Watergate. Comey is rightly viewed as a hero for his handling of the famous hospital incident of March 10, 2004, during which George W. Bush’s top White House aides, Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales, attempted to get bed-stricken, delirious Attorney General John Ashcroft to reauthorize an electronic-surveillance program that Justice Department lawyers had determined was illegal.

Every article written about Comey in coming days will refer to the incident. None of them will capture it as Comey did himself in his testimony May 15, 2007:

One historical sidenote: Comey was persuaded to testify in part by a young aide to Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, Preet Bharara, whom Comey had mentored when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara now holds that job.

When Obama announces the nomination of Comey as FBI director, he will be speaking as a Bush apologist rehabilitating the Bush Administration. It will be a deed of treason on Democrats.

With Comey's nomination, Obama will confirm his presidential campaign of "change" was a complete electrion fraud, and he will confirm he is a pseudo-Democratic President with a morally bankrupt administration that is imploding from scandals.

Comey is unfit to be FBI director. "Comey the Terrible" will assail the constitutional rights of Americans with the abuse and misuse of the criminal justice system. "Comey the Terrible" targeted the destruction of Martha Stewart with bogus charges, including a big-time trumped-up charge with a 10-year prison term and a $2 million fine that was thrown out in court as bizarre, ludicrous, baseless and absurd. The Martha Stewart case stands in condemnation of Comey, a blot on American democracy, and a repudiation of the American constitution.

Just a quick reminder of one of the crimes against the US committed by Paule's pal Alberto.

Gonzales' tenure should have long since come to an end with the December 2005 revelations surrounding the illegal domestic surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency.

Despite the clear statutory language of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), the Attorney General has consistently
maintained the President's inherent powers as Commander-in-Chief allow
the Bush administration to wiretap the communications of American
citizens without seeking the required FISA court warrants. As he told
the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6th, 2006:

"From the very outset, before the program actually commenced, it
has always been the position that FISA cannot be interpreted in a way
that infringes upon the president's constitutional authority."

Despite an overwhelming consensus of constitutional scholars to the contrary, Gonzales' Department of Justice claimed
that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and
the wartime Commander-in-Chief powers give President Bush the statutory
and constitutional basis for sidestepping the FISA process for domestic
electronic surveillance. But as I wrote last February ("The Republicans' Constitutional Crisis"),
Gonzales and his allies are downright sheepish when it comes to stating
the logical conclusion of their position: that FISA itself is
unconstitutional. Their trepidation is well founded; as a matter of law
and of politics, an attack by Republicans on the constitutionality of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is bound to fail.

It is worth noting that Gonzales' January 2007 flip-flop
on court approval for wiretapping Americans' international
communications had less to do with a change of heart than with a change
of control in Congress. Even more important, the Attorney General may
have obstructed justice in getting President Bush to effectively block an April 2006 investigation
into Gonzales' own role in the NSA program by withholding needed
security clearances from the DOJ's own Office of Professional
Responsibility.

5. John Yoo, the Unitary Executive and Unchecked War PowersNo review of Gonzales' essential role in the dangerous and unfounded
expansion of presidential power would be complete without a discussion
of John Yoo.
Yoo, Gonzales' one-time underling at the White House Counsel's office
and now a professor at the University of California, was the architect
behind virtually every Bush administration attempt to establish
unchecked war powers.

In an infamous 2001 memo, Yoo described presidential powers as Commander-in-Chief that would be both unlimited and unchecked:

"We think it beyond question that the President has the plenary
constitutional power to take such military actions as he deems necessary
and appropriate to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United
States on September 11, 2001...Neither statute, however, can place any
limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the
amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing,
and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution,
are for the President alone to make."

As Gonzales' dark theoretician of the imperial presidency, Yoo's handiwork is behind
almost every Bush administration blight on American tradition of civil
liberties and governmental checks and balances. From establishing
"enemy combatants", helping sculpt the NSA domestic spying program to
advocating the secret detention of terror suspects and defining torture
only as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious
physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function,
or even death," Yoo was Gonzales' right-hand man.

It was, after all, Gonzales' own tortured January 25, 2002 memo
while White House Counsel that declared the Geneva Conventions
"quaint." He provided the rationale behind the establishment of enemy
combatant status for Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, proscribing
prisoner of war protections for them.

You know, I lived through Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. I was against Nixon back in the day. Who are you trying to BS? This is so much Bovine feces that I really am surprised that Time ran with it.

Give me a F ing break. Gee, a president up to his chinny chin chin in scandals tries to act like he's above it all by nominating a "tough cop." Has he asked Holder to resign? Nope.

@ahandout And were you against Bush as well? The Ashcroft hospital bed incident alone is much much worse than anything the GOP has claimed on Obama. In your memory when was the last time you have seen the Attorney General, the FBI director and much of their staff threaten to resign over the unlawful overreach of the Presidential Administration? And yet that is exactly what happen in 2004 under GWB.